Developing Missional Leaders: 3 Missiological Principles
Believers participate in Christ’s priesthood not within the walls of the Church but in the daily business of the world. ~ Lesslie Newbigin
No strategy will reach every kind of person except a strategy that mobilizes every kind of person. ~ Brian Sanders
When considering developing and deploying missional leaders from within the church, there are three, interrelated missiological principles that help inform why the church should implement some type of multiplication pipeline or residency process. These three include; the missionary nature of the church, the priesthood of all believers and the concept of vocation.
The Missionary Nature of the Church
Any conversation about deploying the body of Christ into mission should start with recapturing the missionary nature of God and the church. The missionary nature of God can be framed in two primary ways. The first involves the grand narrative of Scripture. When we consider the grand story, or meta-narrative of Scripture, we discover it is about God’s redemptive purposes. Mission is the central theme describing God’s activity throughout all of history to restore creation. The mission of God is what unifies the Bible from creation to new creation.
A second way to recognize God’s missionary nature is to examine the “sending language” throughout the Bible. From God’s sending of Abram in Genesis 12 to the sending of His angel in Revelation 22, literally hundreds of examples of sending language portray God as a missionary-sending God.
But why is it important for us to recapture God's missionary nature in the grand narrative of Scripture? Why should we consider God as a missionary God by examining the sending language throughout the Bible? Here is why it is important. If God is a missionary God (and He is!), then we as His people are missionary people. In other words, the nature and essence of the church is rooted in the missionary nature of God. Another way to articulate this truth is to say that the church doesn’t just send missionaries; the church is the missionary. Individually and collectively as the body of Christ, we are a sent, missionary church.
Therefore, when discussing the “what” and “how” of developing and deploying people into mission, we must begin by helping every follower of Jesus understand that they are a sent, missionary person. We need to help them recognize that God has sent them into their neighborhood, into the marketplace and into the social spaces they inhabit throughout the week to demonstrate and proclaim the good news of the Kingdom.
Recapturing the Priesthood of All Believers
The word laity comes from a Greek word (laos) that means “people.” Today we often use the related term “layperson” in contrast to the word “professional.” A layperson is someone in a particular discipline who is seen as an “amateur”—someone who dabbles in a certain area but doesn’t operate with a high level of skill or expertise. The professional, on the other hand, is the expert. He is the one “in the know.” She has the expertise to operate at a high level. While there may be a place for this division in the business world or the area of sports, there is no biblical basis for such a distinction in the church.
Within the Christian community there are few words that are more disabling than “layperson” and “laity.” The words convey the impression—an impression that quickly solidifies into a lie—that there is a two-level hierarchy among the men and women who follow Jesus. There are those who are trained, sometimes referred to as “the called,” the professionals who are paid to preach, teach, and provide guidance in the Christian way, occupying the upper level. The lower level is made up of everyone else, those whom God assigned jobs as storekeepers, lawyers, journalists, parents, and computer programmers. (1)
Ministry and mission, therefore, is not set aside for some professional class within the church, but instead all the people of God are called and commissioned. In the classic book, The Community of the King, author Howard Snyder speaks to this issue:
The New Testament doctrine of ministry rests not on the clergy-laity distinction but on the twin and complementary pillars of the priesthood of all believers and the gifts of the Spirit. Today, four centuries after the Reformation, the full implications of this Protestant affirmation have yet to be worked out. The clergy-laity dichotomy is a direct carry-over from pre-Reformation Roman Catholicism and a throwback to the Old Testament priesthood. It is one of the principal obstacles to the church effectively being God’s agent of the Kingdom today because it creates a false idea that only “holy men,” namely, ordained ministers, are really qualified and responsible for leadership and significant ministry. In the New Testament there are functional distinctions between various kinds of ministries but no hierarchical division between clergy and laity. (2)
We need to “de-professionalize” ministry and give it back to the people of God. However, this does not mean that we don’t have leaders. Any significant movement that makes an impact has definite leadership. We simply shouldn’t confuse leadership with mission and ministry.
Ephesians 4 tells us that when all the members (laos) are properly working together, the body grows up into maturity, to the stature of the fullness of Christ (4:15). Such maturity is not possible if only 10 percent of the body exercises their calling. Fullness will be found when the other 90 percent activate their gifting.
When we look at the early church (and every other Jesus movement that has had significant impact throughout history), we see that everyone is regarded as a significant agent of the King and is encouraged to find their place in the unfolding of the movement. In other words, in the church that Jesus built, everyone gets to play. In fact, everyone must play!
Rethinking Vocation
In addition to recapturing the priesthood of all believers, we need to rethink the closely related concept of vocation. To illustrate why this is the case, let me ask you a question. Think about what you did yesterday. Just take a couple of minutes to think about your day. Now answer this question: What percentage of what you did yesterday was spiritual, and what percentage was secular?
Let me ask you a follow-up question. Does selling insurance, running a coffee shop, driving for Uber, teaching at a public school or waiting tables at the local restaurant matter to God? If we attempt to answer that question by simply listening to the vast majority of the preaching in North America, the answer would unfortunately, have to be, “Not much.” In one survey, over 90% of Christians said they had never heard a sermon that applied biblical theology to work. Yet, Christians may spend more than half of their lives in work-related activities.
The idea of rethinking vocation must start with considering the sacred-secular divide, or what some people refer to as the problem of dualism. Dualism, simply put, is wrongly dividing something that should not be divided.
The Greco-Roman idea was that the world is divided into two competing dominions: the sacred (spiritual) and the secular (material). Such a worldview tends to assume that the spiritual is the higher realm and the secular, or material world, is lacking deep meaning. Dualism leads to multiple divisions in thinking; including the division between the clergy (spiritual) and the laity (secular), the church (spiritual) and the world (secular), and between so-called religious practices (bible study, prayer, worship) and supposed secular practices (work, art, eating). Where this form of dualism happens most often, is in our understanding of vocation.
The word vocation comes from the Latin vocatio, meaning a call, or summons. It is normally used to refer to a calling or occupation that a person is drawn to or is particularly suited for. The problem of work dualism goes back to the fourth century when Augustine compartmentalize the way people lived when he spoke of the contemplative life and the active life. For Augustine, the contemplative life was given to sacred things and deemed a higher calling, while the active life was given to secular things and regarded as a lower calling.
However, during the Protestant Reformation, in the 1500s, Martin Luther rejected this division between sacred and secular vocations. He broadened the concept of vocation from a very narrow church focus (the priesthood, nuns or monks), to describe the life and work of all Christians in response to God’s call. Luther argued that regardless of the vocation that God called someone to, it was sacred, because it was God who did the calling.
Therefore, it can be said that the doctrine of “the priesthood of all believers did not make everyone into church workers; rather, it turned every kind of work into a sacred calling.” (3) Bottom line—all work matters!
But unfortunately, many Christians still see their work as nothing more than a necessary evil. They don’t understand how their “ordinary” everyday life is part of the mission of God. In the book The Mission of God’s People, author Christopher Wright speaks about how this distorted view of vocation sometimes makes it difficult for people to see what they do outside the church is equally as important, as what they might do inside the church.
God, it would seem, cares about the church and its affairs, about missions and missionaries, about getting people to heaven, but not about how society and its public places are conducted on earth. The result of such dichotomized thinking is an equally dichotomized Christian life. In fact, it is a dichotomy that gives many Christians a great deal of inner discomfort caused by the glaring disconnect between what they think God most wants and what they most have to do. Many of us invest most of the available time that matters (our working lives) in a place and a task that we have been led to believe does not really matter much to God—the so-called secular world of work—while struggling to find opportunities to give some leftover time to the only things we are told does matter to God—evangelism. (4)
Therefore, part of helping people engage God’s mission in the workplace, must begin by giving them a fresh perspective on their vocation, and helping them see how it fits into the broader picture of mission. We must help them understand that when they leave the house on Monday morning to “go to work” they do not somehow leave God behind.
When we fully understand the missionary nature of the church and the enormity of the missional task, church leaders will activate all the people of God to engage in His redemptive mission. We must to be sending the people in the church out among the people of the world rather than attempting to attract the people of the world in among the people of the church. In missionary churches, the effectiveness of leaders is not measured by what they do or do not accomplish, but by how the people of God are discovered, developed and deployed to participate in God’s mission.
Footnotes:
Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way: A Conversation on the Ways Jesus Is the Way (Eerdmans, 2007), p. 32.
Howard Snyder, The Community of the King (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1977), pp. 94-95.
Gene Edward Veith Jr., God at Work (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2002), p. 19.
Christopher Wright., The Mission of God’s People. (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010).
